FBI–CISA PSA Flags Russian Intel Phishing That Hijacked Thousands of Signal Accounts

State-sponsored phishing to sidestep strong cryptography echoes the 2016 GRU spear-phish of John Podesta’s Gmail and even the 1945 VENONA cables—human error, not math, cracked secrets. This episode fits a century-long pattern: every leap in secure communication (telegraph ciphers, Cold-War one-time pads, modern end-to-end apps) prompts attackers to pivot toward the user, exploiting trust cues and urgency. By exploiting Signal’s convenience features rather than its encryption, Moscow underscores how intelligence competition now revolves around identity proof and device hygiene, not codebreaking. If left unchecked, such social-engineering tradecraft could normalize persistent access to elite decision-makers’ private chats, shaping disinformation or strategic leaks for decades—much as interception of diplomatic cables influenced policy before World War I. On a 100-year timeline, the incident is another data point showing that security margins shift from algorithms to psychology; the side that masters behavioral manipulation may gain the next era’s equivalent of the “reading other nations’ mail” advantage that defined 20th-century statecraft.